Get your creative workplace tech up to scratch - or risk losing your best talent

Work management technology and collaboration tools have been a saviour for many marketers in keeping teams connected through the challenges of 2020. Satisfying the heightened expectations of B2B and B2C customers calls for large volumes of content and personalised marketing campaigns delivered at lightning speed and scale - but managing tasks and planning campaigns is all the more difficult if the technology that helps to make it happen wastes time, isn’t fit for purpose and is archaic.

At the same time, technology is becoming an essential requirement in attracting and maintaining talent across the UK, as revealed in the 7th Annual State of Work report by Workfront, an Adobe company. It found that nearly half (49%) of the UK workforce would leave their job if their workplace technology isn’t up to scratch, up from 33% prior to the pandemic. The number of people who turned down a job because the technology was out-of-date or hard to use rose by 18%, while digital workers who applied for a job because they heard a company’s employees use great technology increased by 16%, compared with pre-pandemic data.

If insufficient or inadequate technology is now make or break in the world of work, what can marketers do to attract and retain creative talent, while transforming their teams into a modern marketing engine built on productivity, efficiency and seamless workflows?

Technology for humanity (in a remote working world)

Marketing teams are pushed hard these days to be creative, deliver on time, all while proving ROI, and the stakes are high - from your professional reputation, to your job and livelihood. The key to success is creating a functional partnership between process and time to think up the next amazing creative idea.

There is a distinct human need to find meaning in our work, especially for creative minds. Given that marketing teams are now used to working completely remotely, away from the team dynamic and those water cooler conversations, it’s important for both productivity and wellbeing that technology keeps us connected with the rest of the team. The day-to-day impact of outdated or irrelevant technology on the UK workforce left employees feeling less productive (45%), more stressed (33%) and unable to take on new tasks (36%), per Workfront’s report.

Many marketing departments are in the midst of digital transformation, spurred on by the pandemic and choosing the right productivity software is an essential factor, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all process. Use too many different tools, without a clear vision of how they work together, and work can become more complicated, disconnected, siloed, resulting in increased inefficiencies and poor execution quality.

Yet, by focusing on work optimisation, teams can grow their creative capacity and accelerate the content lifecycle by connecting all people, processes and data – resulting in better alignment of strategy, resources and work across the marketing organisation.

To do this requires technology that enables marketing teams to:

• Manage work from a single place

• Streamline and evaluate incoming work requests to ensure budget, resources and timelines can be met

• Organise the right projects and tasks using predefined templates, removing any guesswork involved

• Stay in the tools they know and love (Photoshop, InDesign, XD etc.) while keeping everyone informed along the way.

Equipping teams and individuals within the marketing department with thoughtful integration points improves campaign delivery by making workflow processes simpler and more efficient, boosting team performance and quality, promoting innovation, increasing speed to market, at the same time providing visibility across the workforce to enhance collaboration and give businesses the ability to execute at scale.

By implementing a work management application like Workfront, now a plug-in application to the Adobe Creative suite, teams can conceive and iterate ideas faster, while eliminating disjointed technology processes that take away from the creative process. By increasing creative capacity and seamlessly managing workflows, that leaves more time for marketers to do what they do best - bringing customer experiences to life.

With greater demand for the newest and best technology, brands and agencies are at risk of losing their best talent for the simple reason that their tech isn’t up to scratch. The tools are already out there, so what are you waiting for? There’s no time like the present to adapt your technology and workflows to attract and retain talent, before it’s too late.